Well I know it now, but when found out that Gil Scot Heron's dad was the first black footballer to play for Celtic (a Scotish football/soccer team for the overseas ppl) in the 1950's. I was like W0w, I didnt know that.

gosh yes i read about that in a newspaper about three weeks ago and was gobsmacked

Immryr's search for a Go gameboard in another thread lead me to some interesting facts on wikipedia:

The game complexity of Go is such that describing even elementary strategy fills many introductory books. In fact, numerical estimates show that the number of possible games of Go far exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe

and

As of June 2008, the most powerful supercomputer in the world, IBM's "Roadrunner" distributed cluster, can sustain 1.02 petaflops. At this rate, even given an exceedingly low estimate of 10 flops required to assess the value of one play of a stone, Roadrunner would require 138 hours, more than five days, to assess all possible combinations of the next eight moves in order to make a single play.

well the beginning is certainly not without eyebrow raising passages, either total cliche or simply "oh wow he goes from that... all the way to this in one sentence. as if a simple matter of course???"

but not ready to give up since i like the premise (a lot), and i'm hoping there are rewards later. did you find it completely a waste of time?

all the gold in the world would fit in the space beneath the arches of the Eiffel Tower

fish are not soluble in water

speaking of gold, i learnt this week that there has been no independent audit of the amount of gold in Fort Knox since the 1950s. It might be long gone for all anyone outside the Federal Reserve knows.

Gustave is a massive Nile crocodile living in Burundi. Estimated to be around 6.7 metres (22 ft) in length and weighing around 1.3 tons, he is the largest confirmed crocodile ever seen in Africa.[1] He is a notorious man-eater, who is rumored to have claimed as many as 300 victims from the banks of the Ruzizi River and the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika. While this number is likely exaggerated, Gustave has attained a near-mythical status and is greatly feared by people in the region. He is said to hunt and leave his victims' corpses uneaten.